« Roman Governance in Pre-70 Judaea: What the Incidents under Cumanus (51–52 CE) Suggest »

Résumé
A long-prevailing view, in scholarship as in popular culture (Ben-Hur, Life of Brian, The Passion of the Christ, Rome, Those who are About to Die), sees Rome’s rule of Judaea as brutally oppressive, even an ‘occupation’. Recent decades have witnessed the proliferation of anti-imperial and anti-colonial (or at least postcolonial) readings of texts produced by Jews and Christians in this period. Lacking the time for a deep dive into the many particular aspects of this question, in this lecture I take up a single cluster of three incidents described by Josephus — with some differences in his two histories — that occurred in 51/52 CE. The imperial legate (a senior senator) in Syria was Ummidius Quadratus, the equestrian prefect / procurator Ventidius Cumanus. By unpacking some crucial dynamics in these episodes, I hope to show why we should question the prevailing picture. This is a small sample, but it encapsulates aspects of the larger picture of Rome’s governance.

Primary Sources 

  • Herodotus 1.1 (first third) (Remacle)
  • Thucydides 1.22 (Remacle)
  • Lucian, How History Should be Written  (Remacle)
  • Josephus, Judaean War 1.1–16 (Remacle)

Scholarly Studies 

  • A. J. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography (1988), especially 197–212 (accessible en ligne sur Sofia)
  • J. Marincola, Authority and Tradition in Classical Historiography (1997), especially 128–74 (malheureusement non disponible à la bibliothèque)
  • D. S. Potter, Literary Texts and the Roman Historian (1999), especially 122–54 (accessible en ligne sur Sofia)
  • C. Pelling, Literary Texts and the Greek Historian (2000), especially 1–7, 44–60 (accessible en ligne sur Sofia)
  • L. Pitcher, Writing Ancient History (2009), especially 1–45 (malheureusement non disponible à la bibliothèque)